Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it doesfrom a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of anassembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the schooldoom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit todoing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-gradedclasses. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine.Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychicviolence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting childrenin their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a momentfar in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a worldwhere Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticketout of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to school for amonth after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," whileBianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her waythrough a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:1.Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.2.Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.3.Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's apartment fromJane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.4.All the above.You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nineschoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause;about thirty-three are murdered there every year. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to agovernment agent called a schoolteacher?I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in themorality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?

One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams. In theconfusion of school affairs even teachers so disposed don't have opportunity to know those things. Howdid this happen?Before you hire a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans showing whatthe finished structure was going to look like. Building a child's mind and character is what publicschools do, their justification for prematurely breaking family and neighborhood learning. Where isdocumentary evidence to prove this assumption that trained and certified professionals do it better than people who know and love them can? There isn't any.The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per bodywhen lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the child's name over the past twelve yearswould have delivered a million dollars to each kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school.The original $200,000 is more than the average home in New York costs. You wouldn't build a homewithout some idea what it would look like when finished, but you are compelled to let a corps of perfect strangers tinker with your child's mind and personality without the foggiest idea what they wantto do with it.Law courts and legislatures have totally absolved school people from liability. You can sue a doctor for malpractice, not a schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to customers years after the homeis built; not schoolteachers, though. You can't sue a priest, minister, or rabbi either; that should be aclue.If you can't be guaranteed even minimal results by these institutions, not even physical safety; if youcan't be guaranteed anything except that you'll be arrested if you fail to surrender your kid, just whatdoes the public in public schools mean?What exactly is public about public schools? That's a question to take seriously. If schools were publicas libraries, parks, and swimming pools are public, as highways and sidewalks are public, then the public would be satisfied with them most of the time. Instead, a situation of constant dissatisfaction hasspanned many decades. Only in Orwell's Newspeak, as perfected by legendary spin-doctors of thetwentieth century such as Ed Bernays or Ivy Lee or great advertising combines, is there anything publicabout public schools.

2. I Quit, I Think

In the first year of the last decade of the twentieth century during my thirtieth year as a school teacher in Community School District 3, Manhattan, after teaching in all five secondary schools in the district,crossing swords with one professional administration after another as they strove to rid themselves of me, after having my license suspended twice for insubordination and terminated covertly once while Iwas on medical leave of absence, after the City University of New York borrowed me for a five-year stint as a lecturer in the Education Department (and the faculty rating handbook published by theStudent Council gave me the highest ratings in the department my last three years), after planning and bringing about the most successful permanent school fund-raiser in New York City history, after placing a single eighth-grade class into 30,000 hours of volunteer community service, after organizingand financing a student-run food cooperative, after securing over a thousand apprenticeships, directingthe collection of tens of thousands of books for the construction of private student libraries, after producing four talking job dictionaries for the blind, writing two original student musicals, andlaunching an armada of other initiatives to reintegrate students within a larger human reality, I quit.I was New York State Teacher of the Year when it happened. An accumulation of disgust andfrustration which grew too heavy to be borne finally did me in. To test my resolve I sent a short essay

to The Wall Street Journal titled "I Quit, I Think." In it I explained my reasons for deciding to wrap itup, even though I had no savings and not the slightest idea what else I might do in my mid-fifties to paythe rent. In its entirety it read like this:Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family bymonopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows fromthe theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by thenarrow peak of a pyramid.That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its "scientific" presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some IronLaw of Biology. It's a religious notion, School is its church. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this wouldhappen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; bysubordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be "re-formed." It has political allies toguard its marches, that's why reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformerscan't imagine school much different.David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are13, you can't tell which one learned first — the five-year spread means nothing at all. But inschool I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, Iadjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow thatdependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever.In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child;hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacredmyths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.That's the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading,standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn't aright way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don't need state-certified teachers to make education happen — that probably guarantees it won't.How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don't need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks.We don't need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise fromignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it. I can't teach this way anylonger. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know.Come fall I'll be looking for work.

3. The New Individualism

The little essay went off in March and I forgot it. Somewhere along the way I must have gotten a notesaying it would be published at the editor's discretion, but if so, it was quickly forgotten in the press of